


China

by ChiaRoseKuro



Series: In Nothing, We'll Stand [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, I still don't know what the rating should be for this, Introspection, M/M, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Chapter 699, Songfic, Uchiha Sasuke-centric, one-sided sasusaku
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-07 21:01:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16415885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChiaRoseKuro/pseuds/ChiaRoseKuro
Summary: china/ ˈtʃʌɪnə /noun.a fine white or translucent vitrified ceramic material;a friendoriginated from Persian ‘chīnī’, lit. “relating to China (where china was originally made)”Years after he leaves the village for the pursuit of vengeance and strength, with his life thoroughly bound to a purpose only he himself knows nowadays, Sasuke clutches the shards of his soul and pretends that everything is fine.





	China

**Author's Note:**

> Eighteen or so months of more dithering, procrastination and written constipation later, the companion story to _Petrichor_ is as complete as it'll ever get. I'd recommend reading the previous works in this series before tackling this one, but it's not entirely necessary and the most you'll miss out on are a few minor references. After all, the other works were from Naruto's perspective, whilst this one is solely from Sasuke's.
> 
> Like its companion story, the primary emotions in this story aren't exactly positive ones... so if you don't want to read about regret, grief and anger, you're best off clicking that 'back' button now. The disillusionment and nihilism present in _Petrichor_ are far heavier here, most notably because Sasuke is a lot more ill-adjusted than Naruto, and the general trauma associated with someone as angst-riddled as Sasuke applies too. Succinctly put, this isn't a fluffy fic and won't bring a smile to your face.
> 
> Special thanks to Coldplay's [Princess of China](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uw6ZkbsAH8) for retrospectively applying itself as the story's theme song and lending itself to the title. Whilst other songs were more prominent in the writing phase (e.g. [this BTS remix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2m2IYSua3k) and [Singularity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8npDG2ulKQ)), 'Princess of China' contributed the most to the planning phase, so it takes pride of place.

* * *

 

There’s nothing but rubble at the Valley of the End, now. It’s hard to remember what Hashirama and Madara were like when the largest remnants of their statues are two wind-weathered hands and nobody’s willing to replace the iconic statues again. What hadn’t been destroyed in the battle—one that will never be chronicled or told to future generations—was given over to the elements for destitution and ruin, and little else but scorched earth remains.

Even Sasuke, with his Sharingan and his fastidious memory, can barely see past the sluggish river and creeping moss anymore.

It wouldn’t be hard to reconstruct it, really—Tsunade’s still alive, if not well past her prime, and anyone with an Earth affinity and a head for instructions couldn’t go too wrong. The river would run clear and Konoha’s guardians would stand tall once more, straddling an eternal boundary neither can cross.

Hashirama the protector and Madara the dissenter. Senju and Uchiha.

And to think they were on the same side of that river once, lamenting the warfare and hoping for a better world.

Something catches Sasuke’s eye, then—something someone else would brush off as innocuous, but which makes his breath catch in his chest. It’s been years since he’s been back, almost half a lifetime beyond the first of many battles against Konoha, and by all rights it shouldn’t be there. By all rights, the marks of his last battle against Konoha should no longer exist.

But he kneels anyway, pressing fingers against red-rusted rock.

It should mean nothing to him.

(it means everything to him)

It should all be in the past.

(it’s never left his head)

The pain and hurt should be gone.

(it never ends—his hands are dyed with _his_ blood—)

It’s the closest Sasuke’s been to Konoha for months but his feet remain stuck on the rubble. _Coward_ , his mind hisses, but his mind knows who should be standing at his back and who should be blocking his way forward. Is it coincidence that he has Madara’s blood coursing through his veins? Is it happenstance that he will likely be the last?

The Valley of the End is nothing more than a scar in Konoha’s wound-riddled past and a mark of battles greater than the people who undertook them, but here and now…

With time, the stone hands will crumble and the valley will renew itself. He can only hope that, with time, the fissures between himself and the world will close, too.  
  


* * *

  
“You know,” Karin says, trying to catch Sasuke’s averted gaze as she wipes the fresh bite on her arm, “you have a perfectly good healer back in Konoha.”

“Hn.”

“She would be _more_ than happy to treat you, I’m sure,” Karin adds pointedly, flinging the cloth in Sasuke’s direction and scoffing when he dodges it.

“Hn.”

“As wonderful as my chakra is,” Karin sighs, “I’d like to live longer and with _all_ of me intact, if that’s alright with you.”

“ _Hn._ ”

“Oh, and Suigetsu decided I wouldn’t make a good mother for his children, so I’m impregnating him with genetically-engineered sperm Orochimaru-sama made from my genes.”

Sasuke’s head jerks up at that, but a few seconds of Karin’s raucous laughter is enough to make him scowl and avert his gaze again. He’s aware that Konoha is better-equipped for his needs, has friendlier faces more likely to treat him without this level of disdain and family records tailored to his needs— _but that was then_ , his mind reminds him. His last memories of the hospital and Konoha’s medic-nin were rooted in the time before—before the Chuunin exams, before Orochimaru marked him, _before_ —but now…

In the days before he’d left, taking Kakashi’s dry warning and Sakura’s offer and Naruto’s promise with him, Sasuke had remembered walking the streets. Civilians and shinobi alike had given him admiring glances and fawning smiles, when he was the last loyal Uchiha and nothing more than a child, but in the days following the Fourth Shinobi War—it had been like he’d swapped places with the Naruto back then. _Someone like you would normally be imprisoned,_ Kakashi had said, and it showed in their gazes and their low whispers. _I’m sure you’ll understand,_ he’d dryly added, and he _had_.

How could Sasuke stay as Konoha’s tame pet when he’d almost razed it to the ground? How could he, a missing-nin with countless deaths to his name, ever be considered loyal? _You were raised by this village,_ were some of the whispers that went around, _your bloodline was ours_.

And with words like that, with _unshakeable faith_ like that—no wonder Madara went mad.

Sasuke doesn’t have to like it, doesn’t have to ever sympathize, but… he understands. It should terrify him, understanding a madman well past his time, but what can scare him when he’s his own worst nightmare? Who else would allow a madman’s pathetic, twisted words to take root and flourish?

“Go back to your home,” Karin tells him as she lingers at the door, but before he can say anything she’s gone back—to antagonizing Suigetsu, Sasuke would say, even if she says it’s _work_.

But if she’d stayed a moment longer, had ears trained on his voice…

(from the moment Itachi killed his entire clan and Orochimaru marked him out as his own, they turned their backs on him)

“If it were that simple,” Sasuke says, and slips from the room without a sound.

(Konoha is many things, but it ceased to be home when his mother breathed her last)  
  


* * *

  
Rubble and rust, bloodstains and dust—there was an abundance of that, back in the Uchiha compound, and Sasuke traces the jagged edge of a stone with a thoughtful frown. They had been a _true_ clan once, proud members of a police force even the civilians could understand and appreciate with a legendary dojutsu only the Hyuuga could rival. Like the unbroken land this once was, there was nothing that could shake their foundations or bring them low.

And then they had fallen until there had only been one.

Madara defecting. Decreased trust in the police force. Being held back from the Nine-Tails’ attack, only to be reviled for following orders. Isolation in a compound. And then, as though to add insult to injury, the coup d’état that never was.

When did the mountain fall, its lofty peak becoming nothing more than chipped pebbles underfoot? Where was the strength, the respect, the _camaraderie_ they’d fought so long and hard for?

_Bastard,_ Naruto called him and calls him still, but Sasuke has never been anything other than his clan’s son. Born of a father who rarely smiled but talked of him in hushed whispers when he thought Sasuke wasn’t listening, born of a mother who saw him as more than a spare but still left the world for Itachi’s sake—what is his sum worth? A man of secrets and filled with arrogance, who shattered others in the name of love?

_A stupid, stubborn bastard with a stick up his ass,_ Naruto would say, eyes forced shut from a grin hardly contained by his face. _No wonder you’ve got a duck-butt for hair!_

“Moron,” Sasuke whispers to the wind, but it blows his insult to Oto instead of Konoha.

And isn’t it ironic that the dead last and the moron is head of the oldest and most feared hidden village? Isn’t it tragic that the monster was the only one with a human heart, taking care to pass on stupid inane details about his life for all of the days Sasuke languished inside? _It was never your fault,_ Naruto would say—but what did he know?

To protect something fragile, you don’t pad it with cotton and hide it away. You break it, shatter it until it’s nothing like it was before, and you tell it to reform itself how it will.

The last loyal Uchiha, everyone had thought, and in the end his loyalty was won by a man the village tried so very hard to cast out. The clan brat, the genius with a troubled past—kunoichi wanted to be with him and the male nin wanted to _be_ him—but Naruto. The last of the long-lived, chakra-abundant Uzumaki and the son of the Fourth, the class clown with an equally troubled past… it was only a few measly scores that lumped them together.

But oh, how they’d stuck. How they’d _stuck_ with one another and never let go.

Would his father turn away, seeing Sasuke fraternize with the demon fox that sealed their fate? Would his mother cry, seeing Sasuke pass through life hating the brother he should’ve loved?

(then he thinks of his mother’s wistful smile when she talked of her best friend, remembers his father’s gaze lingering on the fourth face carved into a cliff face, and wonders)

(who _really_ started the tremors that broke the earth beneath their feet?)

Crumbling dirt and what had once been a pebble beneath his hand, Sasuke looks to the sky and tries his hardest not to blink. It’s times like this that make him wonder if the coppery tang in his mouth will ever wash away—but it does, it always does, and only its malevolent ghost remains.  
  


* * *

  
She catches him just as he’s slipping out of Konoha’s front gates, blocking his path in a sudden swirl of leaves and bubblegum-pink hair. There’s a familiar rigidity to her jaw that makes Sasuke think of years long gone, of slim fingers catching on his sleeve and tears refusing to fall from green eyes, but this is not the fangirl who couldn’t begin to fathom the thoughts in his head.

This is the kunoichi with a spine of steel, capable of cracking his skull open with a single fist and who lived through simulations of her death without losing her sanity. This is the very person he had never wanted to meet like this, on the cusp of another trip that will leave him out of town for months on end, and…

_Why?_ Sasuke wants to ask, but he doesn’t need to be a Yamanaka to see the answer reflected in her eyes.

Years have passed, arguments had been had—but here Sakura stands anyway. Sasuke wants to turn away, leave her staring after his back like he’d done all those times before, but…

“You’re leaving again?” Sakura directs to his turned back, and Sasuke knows what expression will be on her face if he turns to look.

Poorly-hidden resignation barely covered in nonchalance—and Sasuke wants to laugh at her naivety, her misshapen hope. For all that Sakura’s the only one left in the world with a seal more than capable of ripping a battlefield apart, it would only take a few words from him to rend her heart asunder. He’d even done it the first time she’d begged to leave with him—tried to push her feelings onto him, tried to invalidate his feelings for his family and his brother—but she _still_ hasn’t learnt a thing.

(how long will she continue to foist her rose-tinted glasses onto him?)

(how many times would he have to say _no_ for her to _understand_?)

It’s been years since he knocked her unconscious after her desperate pleas for him to stay, but the years fall away when he feels her hands tugging at his coat. Sakura’s one of the strongest women he knows, both physically and emotionally—but the very same woman is stifling sobs and lowering her head to him.

Lowering her head to a world-recognized _traitor_ , and isn’t it funny how deep her feelings run? Sasuke was like that once, forever chasing after a shadow too large for him to ever fill, and all he has left are ghosts tainted with blood and betrayal.

The mirror reflects back a face he can’t bear to see but Sakura…

“Sasuke, _please_ ,” Sakura murmurs from where she’s pressed her forehead in between his shoulders, and Sasuke can’t help the shudder that races up his spine.

“I don’t need to listen to you,” Sasuke replies, voice harsh in a way he rarely is for literally _anyone_ else, but he knows Sakura too well.

Knows that she’ll keep pushing, keep chasing after his back—will even drag other people into her problems because she may be a grown woman, but there’s almost no difference between her and the little girl he’d trapped in a genjutsu and forced death after imagined death upon. What is it that she wants from him—his family’s fame? The cast-off light from a twisted prodigy? _Pretty children?!_

_Sakura loves you more than you could ever imagine,_ Naruto had told him once, but love is the _last_ thing Sasuke hears in her words.

There’s two points of wetness seeping through his coat and Sasuke’s mouth twists at the unwelcome sensation. He twitches his coat out of her grasp and she almost loses her balance when he steps away from her grasping hands, but there’s no pity in his expression. There’s never been, after all, so why should he start now?

And yet the look in her eyes is that of betrayal all the same.

“You’ve already done enough,” Sasuke hisses, remembering a far-off scream breaking against his back. “You’ve already _meddled_ enough.”

Being accused of a coward, fighting atop his ancestor’s head using tainted, _borrowed power_ —it was Naruto who’d thrown himself at Sasuke but he _knows_ whose words spurred him on. It’s a struggle not to let his eyes bleed red but he manages, somehow, and it’s Sakura who averts her eyes first.

_What, are you gonna run away?!_ Naruto had yelled at his back all those years ago, and Sasuke…

“It’s because I _care,_ ” Sakura whispers, choked out through sobs that make shivers crawl down Sasuke’s spine. “Sasuke, you _know_ I’ve always—”

“Stood in my way?” Sasuke smoothly asks, lips curled in a light sneer.

It’s almost too easy to make her face crumple in, even less of a challenge than it was to rile Naruto up back in their genin days, and if Sasuke wasn’t already sneering then he would right now. Years of tutelage under the strongest kunoichi to ever grace the Five Nations… and _this_ was the result? Where was the woman who’d saw fit to wrangle more of apology out of him when he was half-bleeding to death?

If Naruto was the man he eventually grew to see as more than a stepping stone and more than a blood brother, then Sakura was the woman who took two steps back for every one she took forward. For all that she had nothing to do with Sasuke’s sins, she sure comes back to _haunt_ him like them every time he stepped foot into Konoha.

And it shows in the way her eyes burn with misplaced determination, white fingers clenching whiter around his empty sleeve. “It was all for you!” Sakura tells him earnestly, like trying to foist her ideals on him was somehow _beneficial_ and _desirable_ , and even when his sneer grows more pronounced she babbles, “Weren’t you the one who wanted to see me?”

Sasuke’s not deaf and blind—he can _see_ the way she colours up at the last question and hear the shy little stutter in her words. It’s as though Sakura thinks it’s _cute_ , coyly pushing his lapses in judgement back onto his shoulders. It’s as though they’re twelve again, trapped in a team neither of them could work with.

“It’s like medicine, sometimes,” Sakura continues in a self-deprecating tone, and it takes every fibre of his being to keep Sasuke from lighting her hair on fire.

She waxes rhapsodic about a metaphor Sasuke couldn’t care less about, likening her adoration to a healing salve. There’s so much bullshit shoved into every single word that it makes his head spin, eyes cold and heart colder at the sheer number of assumptions Sakura spews. _I’m the one who held onto you long after you’d left,_ she doesn’t quite say. _I never gave up on you, even when you had given up on me._

_So what did you say back at the Kage summit?_ he’s almost tempted to ask.

But he doesn’t, because—what’s the point?

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Sasuke asks, tiredness seeping into his tone. “I don’t like you. I’ll _never_ like you.

“Even if you were the last person in the Five Nations, I’d rather die celibate.” Sakura’s expression crumples like wet paper but Sasuke takes the time to hiss, “You can’t make me stay and you _certainly_ can’t guilt-trip me into it, so _stop_.”

And for all that Sasuke knows how Naruto will react, turning those _damnable_ blue eyes on him and brimming with self-righteous disappointment, his lips still tick upwards when Sakura loosens her hold on his sleeve. He might’ve cared for both his team members, once, but now…

“Find someone else to fixate on,” Sasuke says flatly, and disappears in a swirl of leaves.  
  


* * *

  
The air stills around Sasuke and he sucks in a harsh breath, fists clenched against unwanted memories and eyes burning from moisture he refuses to let fall. It would be so easy to turn back and lose himself amongst the trees he grew up with. It would be so _simple_ to linger in their leafy embrace.

But his life was never made to conform like others’ did—not when his _dear_ brother had destroyed the foundations in a sea of fire and blood. For all that Sasuke had done in the past few years to atone, wandering the land to better understand what people like himself had done to everyone else…

So many memories lingered in the crumbling dust beneath his feet. Hashirama’s and Madara’s fights, his own with Naruto—doubtless legends would be written about them in the same way, if Sasuke wasn’t erased from history first.

_The Valley of the End,_ and what a fitting name it was.

What would Naruto be doing now, cosily situated in the office he’d dreamt about as a child? What would all those _good_ Konoha citizens be doing now, going about their mundane lives? A breeze ruffles Sasuke’s hair and he closes his eyes, face upturned to the sky as tiny droplets prickle at his skin.

So many years had passed, but Sasuke still remembers blood and flesh beneath his fingernails. So much had been lost and gained, but those tears before they’d both transformed—that feral blankness in the seconds _before_ —

_Naruto,_ he’d muttered, staring down at that unresponsive, smooth face. _I…_

If it hadn’t been for the rain and Kakashi’s chakra, if Naruto had been anything but pale and unmoving, _if_. So many possibilities lost to the sands of time, and he…

_Ah,_ Sasuke thinks distantly, _I’ve bitten through my tongue._

But the coppery taste stays in his mouth, even when he spits it out like he did all those years ago.  
  


* * *

  
In the rain that blankets the accursed land, Sasuke closes his eyes and draws in a breath of water and earth and bitter regret.

Another second, another breath, and then—  
  


* * *

  
“Oops, clumsy me!” Naruto laughs, and sweeps the remains of his shattered cup away.

Steam from spilt tea wafts in the air and dissipates, blanketing the smell of paper and ink and unforgettable memories in its wake.

**Author's Note:**

> If the overall timeline means anything to you, this story runs concurrently to _Petrichor_ , which is to say that it occurs in the nebulous period after Naruto becomes the Seventh Hokage. Given that my original tumblr has disappeared into the ether and I've been too lazy to repost the original series notes, you're best off checking the series description for more information, or the extended author's notes on my [blog](https://chiarosekuro.wordpress.com) whenever I get around to posting it. Eventually, I'll try and re-explain my idea of a 'realistic' canon... but if you're left with more questions than answers, I guess now would be the time to read the other stories in the series to answer some of those question (or raise a few more in their wake!).
> 
> But feel free to drop a comment on my blog or on this story if you really do have a pressing question and want me to answer it. Chances are, it'll be addressed whenever I get around to posting _Paris_ , but I'll do my best to not be a cryptic bastard.


End file.
